Susan Wise Bauer

Undercover Among the Evangelicals

In 2005, Gina Welch put on ugly buckled loafers and a loose purple sweater and joined Thomas Road Baptist Church. She also grew out her short hair, gained some weight (her "temporary church body"), and replaced her gold nail polish with "good girl pink." The dowdiness was strategic: she was trying to look evangelical.

Welch, a self-described secular Jew, had moved to Virginia for graduate school a couple of years earlier. The relocation was a shock. Suddenly she realized that a Berkeley childhood and four years at Yale had given her a slightly skewed perspective on the American religious landscape. Evangelicalism wasn't a weird local aberration after all; secular America was actually "limited real estate on the vast territory controlled by Christians."

She decided to investigate that vast territory as an insider. "I wanted to know what my evangelical neighbors were like as people …. I wanted to try to take them on their own terms," she writes. "I felt I needed to go unnoticed if I was going to get an authentic understanding." So she went to Thomas Road, pretending to be a new convert, and spent nearly a year living as an undercover atheist. Unbelieving, she was baptized. (The water was cold, and her mascara ran.) Unbelieving, she took the Lord's Supper. ("I was hungry. Is it wrong to think of this as a refreshment?") Unbelieving, she went on a mission trip to Alaska and led a little girl through the sinner's prayer.

That's a lot of effort, but Welch was driven by a sense of mission, determined to break through the stereotypes and explain to the world that evangelicals aren't really all that scary after all. In the Land of Believers, the story of the months she spent as a member of Thomas Road, is her manifesto.

"My hope for this book," Welch writes on her website, "is that it will provide readers with a vivid portrayal of evangelical hearts and minds to eclipse the old, broad caricatures." By the end of her sojourn, she has developed an affection for her NASCAR-loving, gun-toting, fry-eating evangelical friends—an affection she recommends to her secular compatriots. In the Land of Believers concludes with this earnest plea:

If we don't love Evangelicals, if we don't make an effort to understand and accept them, to eat the fish even as it wriggles in our hands, we'll always be each other's nemeses. We'll always be trying to drown each other out. Threaten them, ridicule them, celebrate their humiliation, and you create a toxic dump, fertile ground for a ferocious adversary to rise, again and again. But listen to them, include them in the public conversation, understand the sentiments behind their convictions, and you invent the possibility of kinship.

Apart from the creepy and inexplicable metaphor, this sounds good—until you realize that "understand the sentiments behind their convictions" is exactly what Welch means. She may claim to be portraying the evangelical mind, but her entire narrative is marked by a determined refusal to comprehend that there is one.

"[H]ow was I to find a place among people indifferent to facts?", Welch writes in her introduction. It is an opinion that never shifts a millimeter. Listening to Jerry Falwell preach about the offense of the cross, she muses: "By embracing the inscrutable cross, Christians were comfortable not fully comprehending the concepts around which they built their lives." Christian beliefs bypass the brain altogether; the whole notion of the Trinity, she remarks, "reminded me of nothing more than Dracula's ability to transmute into a bat or mist." She is tone-deaf to conviction, unable to comprehend that doctrine has anything to do with the behavior of the people she claims to love.

Which is simpler for her, because she can blame everything she dislikes about evangelicals on cultural influence, and cultivate her affection for them without having to think about what they actually believe. "I expected to go in as a sort of anthropologist," she writes at the end of her experiment:

I expected to discover the sociological underpinnnings for evangelical wackiness. I never imagined that I would feel a kind of belonging. Because beyond basically appreciating my friends as fellow human beings, I finally understood what it felt like to believe you knew something that had the power to improve the lives of others. You felt compelled to share it. And whose fault was their ignorance? It was hard to blame them entirely.

The answer to the rhetorical question is, apparently, the South. In Welch's world, Christians have "violently side-parted" hair, buckle their belts under ponderous bellies, think airplane travel is exotic, and leave lousy tips. "Could I be a Christian woman to a Christian man?", she wonders, considering what it would be like to be a real evangelical instead of the undercover atheist variety. "Could I hold his hand and my zipper-bagged Bible as we hurried into church together? Could I look at him across a basket of bottomless fries and be content?"

This is the first time I have ever read Susan Wise Bauer. I agree with everything she has written in this article about an undercover agent for the atheist communtiy. What a disgusting sense of belonging. I am sad for Gina Welch. I do pray that her inquisitive mind will someday find the Truth. As for being an undercover agent for the Christian community, if you are true to your faith, it won't last long. May God shine through the lives of those who believe, even if we are ONLY sinners. One of the greatest rewards of being a believer is the Freedom to Worhip the One True God with No fear. Whether others accept our belief we will always believe.

George

August 24, 20101:36pm

Would it be more fair to characterize Thomas Road/Jerry Falwell as more Fundamental, not Evangelical? Understanding the difference could throw off the whole book's purpose and conclusions!
I might have said that this book and this author wouldnt interest me in the least. But, then she would feel vindicated in her conclusions. Even when I dont agree with him.....I'll take a reasoned Mark Noll any day!

Janice

August 06, 201011:56am

I suppose Nancy Arnold's comment used no reasoning in expressing her belief that reason is at odds with belief or that "you can't prove a belief using reason."
Isaiah 1:18
"Come now, let us reason together," says the LORD
Job 12:24
"He deprives the leaders of the earth of their reason; he sends them wandering through a trackless waste."
Nancy,
It takes both faith and reason to come to belief.

Dave West

August 05, 201010:47am

It is very sad to see evangelicals straining at gnats to assist God in defending Himself. OR... maybe it's really the evangelicals just trying to defend themselves in light of Thomas Road's (Liberty College/Jerry Falwell) many Christian shortcomings in their documented past. Either way, Ms. Welch's book and Mark Noll's "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" are must reads if we are to understand these people.

matthew

July 20, 20103:50pm

This book is a result of deeply dishonest actions. I couldn't imagine doing the things the author is described as doing if I didn't believe in any of it. Just because the end result is a book doesn't make it right. I think the premise of the book immediately undermines the reader's trust in the author. Why even read page 1?

ron

July 15, 20105:22pm

I don't think Ms. Welch was any less objective than most of us evangelicals. We all (including journalists and other writers) see the world through self-selected lenses of life experience, intellectual understanding and, in our case, the Gospel. We're looking at the same thing but seeing it differently. This leads me to a couple conclusions: one, we do look pretty funny to much of the "others". Therefore it's extremely difficult for an "other" to embrace Jesus sans the Holy Spirit's powerful influence. We have experienced The Influence. And we are better for it. Ms. Welch did seem to see some of that "better." Conclusion two, we must meet "others" on their ground, listen to their stories, commiserate with their pain and let them have opinions contrary to ours. Isn't that the essence of the incarnation?

Karen

July 15, 201012:22am

The main thoughts I had after reading the review are if a Christian had gone undercover to a temple or a mosque, etc., and then didn't let any of the members know, and then wrote a book that is not objective or mature, how would those members feel? I would think that both Jews and Moslems would be horribly offended, and I would completely understand this. I can't imagine doing something so offensive as voluntarily practicing the rites and traditions of another religion with the goal of writing a book that denigrates the members that I worshipped with. What hypocrisy and arrogance!

Nancy Arnold

July 14, 20101:41pm

This review and book remind me that reason is at odds with belief. You can't prove a belief using reason. But you should be able to see the difference in behavior if you are truly born again. Unfortunately, the observations many unbelievers make of so called believer's behaviors indicates that belief makes no difference in the lives of Christian. There was an old song that said you will know they are Christian by their love. Now you can know they are Christians by their self righteous and judgemental attitude towards unbelievers. Why would anyone want to disregard reason just to be Christian now?

Melesa

July 14, 201011:56am

I'm afraid that articles such as this may be the very thing that prompts Welch and others to make such comments about Evangelicals. Perhaps instead of being so quick to criticize and fire back, we should consider the idea that maybe there's something valuable in Welch's critique.
On the topic of the evangelical mind, I would highly recommend Mark Noll's "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind."

James

July 14, 201011:29am

"In Welch's world, Christians have "violently side-parted" hair, buckle their belts under ponderous bellies, think airplane travel is exotic, and leave lousy tips."
Hmmm. That would also describe 1/2 the humanists I know in upstate New York.